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Comment by blakesterz | Hacker News Reader

  "While this is a step in the right direction, let's be real: it hardly solves the problem of robotaxis interfering with emergency vehicles. Asking a police officer, firefighter, or EMT to sit in the driver's seat and take control of a vehicle during an emergency is a Band-Aid fix."

That was my first thought as well. That feels like it would take way too much time in an emergency. I suppose it's better than nothing?

I have no idea what an actual solution would be though. Some kind of remote control / kill switch thingy? Everything I can think of seems kind of half baked at best.

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Having an ability for a remote driver to quickly take over the vehicle via some kind of telepresence solution is one way to cover a percentage of the situations where these vehicles block emergency responders. But how to quickly initiate that? reliably?

If the emergency disrupts cell service, there would be no way to remotely take control of the vehicle.

And securely. Once you allow for remote control, there are all sorts of threats.

> I have no idea what an actual solution would be though.

Take these robocars off the roads until they're read to respond to emergency vehicles properly.

That reliably solves every conceivable situation where these vehicles might block or impede emergency responders.

In general, we should probably get all cars off the road until we can guarantee that they won't get into accidents. Once we have a 100% guarantee that no human lives are lost and no environmental harm can occur, we can slowly introduce one or two cars and see what happens. Perhaps the people who drive these cars should be highly trained professional drivers.

Then we can slowly introduce one or two amateur drivers and see if they cause any harm when going about their daily lives.

After we study the effects for a few decades we should be able to safely allow a few more people to drive cars on the road.

There is system in place for dealing with human drivers who misbehave in traffic - if it doesn't kill them, we can at least throw them in jail to think about what they've done.

Perhaps if robotaxi company executives, employees and scientists were liable when their cars messed up, they might be a bit less cavalier about letting them screw up traffic.

No one gets killed for screwing up traffic haha. And where Cruise operates, no one goes to jail for screwing up traffic. What does happen is people kill humans, and no amount of jailing the killers brings anyone back.

So let's make human driven cars safe before we let them on the road. When AVs kill as many people as human driven cars, we can switch.

Bull-bars on the front of emergency vehicles? /s

Cop cars and ambulances used to have them for pretty much that reason.

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